Shuroki Online

I wanted to let everybody know about a new idea in bookmarking that I’ve been playing with lately. The idea isn’t particularly new, but the execution and way it’s being used are.

I think the “”official”" term is “”social bookmarking”", an offshoot of social networking. The main idea is that you keep all of your bookmarks on a webpage, rather than on your computer – and you let the world see them.

There are a few different services that are doing this in a couple of different ways. One that I used for awhile is called Stumble Upon which uses a little applet that is installed in your browser. It’s pretty cool because you kind of bookmark other people who have similar interests and when you’re bored you just click the “”Stumble Upon”" button and it will randomly pop up a webpage from their collections. You can tell it to stick within a certain genre of site, and it lets users place comments for sites.

I found that I didn’t have much time to stumble around, and I started using Delicious (http://Del.icio.us). What I really like about Delicious is that it doesn’t have a separate program to download – it’s all maintained on their website.

When you add a new bookmark to Delicious you give it “”tags”" which are just another term for keywords. Along the right-hand side of the screen is listed all of the various tags that you’ve assigned to sites, in alphabetical order (it also shows the total number of sites that share that keyword).

The social part comes in because every site listed has a little number under it of how many other Delicious users have also tagged that site. When you click on the number, you can see what keyword other people have given that site and you can look at all of their bookmarks to look for things that you find interesting.

Here’s an example of how it works:

The other day my wife sent me the address of a site that does movie ratings. Their rating system is really cool because it is much more flexible and informative as to the CONTENT in a movie, rather than an arbitrary “”PG”" or “”R”" rating.

So, I added this site into Delicious and saw that 8 other people also had it in theirs. When I clicked on one guys “”ratings”" tag I saw that he had three more simliarly helpful sites that had excellent rating systems for games and cartoons.

If I was just Googling around for these sites I would probably eventually find them, but I would also have to sift through a couple hundred sites that were useless to what I was after.

The other real benefit of Delicious is that you don’t have to worry about synchronizing bookmarks across multiple computers. I regularly use two and sometimes three Internet connected computers and it is a real pain to keep the bookmarks together.

Don’t you hate it when you’re at a friend or relatives house and you can’t remember the address of some site? With Delicious, they are always there in one spot. You just cruise to the site address and put your username at the end of the address to see all of your bookmarks. For instance, my Delicious username is Choochus, so if you head to “”http://del.icio.us/choochus”" you’ll see all of my bookmarks and tags. Throw one of the tags at the end of the address and you’ll see all of the sites within that tag — so to look at all of my movie links you’d surf to “”http://del.icio.us/choochus/movies”".

Now here’s the real kicker — every page on Delicious is automatically RSS enabled. If you remember from my Podcasting article, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the technology that gives you live headlines on the sidebars of most websites now-a-days. By “”subscribing”" to someones main Delicious page, or to one of their tags, you can get regular, automatic updates, when they add a site in a catagory that you’re interested in.

Like many Internet sites and services Delicious is free to use and makes their money from adwords, banners and the like. Anybody can cruise around Delicious members pages of bookmarks without an account, but hey, the account is free and the real benefit is seeing what other gems people have found that are similar to the stuff you are already interested in!

So create an account and start bookmarking!! Let me know what username you picked so I can peruse your tags and see what cool stuff you’re into.
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